Remember how close the last two presidential elections were? Election forecasters give former President Donald Trump substantially better chances in the 2024 presidential election than they did in 2016 and 2020.
Fewer than 100,000 votes in a few vital swing states determined the outcomes of those elections, with Trump beating former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in the Rust Belt in 2016 and President Joe Biden narrowly taking it in 2020.
The big difference between those two elections and the 2024 race is that Trump was a massive underdog in 2016 and 2020. That’s no longer the case.
Trump was a slight favorite to win the 2024 presidential election as of Monday, according to election forecaster FiveThirtyEight, owned by ABC News. The site’s projections said that Trump won the election 52 out of 100 times, while Vice President Kamala Harris won it 48 out of 100. Meanwhile, The Economist has Trump winning 54 out of 100 times and Harris winning the other 46.
Compare these projections to those from this same time four years ago. FiveThirtyEight had Biden with an 87% chance of winning the election on Oct. 21, 2020, and Trump at a mere 13%, making the sitting president a big underdog.
Those are roughly the same odds FiveThirtyEight gave Trump on Oct. 21, 2016; it gave Clinton an 86.2% chance of winning and Trump a 13.2% shot. The projections for Trump, at times, were far worse in 2016, with HuffPost giving Clinton a 98% chance to win in October.
It is no surprise that expectations are much higher for Trump from election forecasters this time. Trump is facing the incumbent vice president from a failing administration.
Many voters realize that electing Harris as president would give the country four more years of the same failed Biden administration policies that have most people feeling worse off than they were four years ago, according to a recent Gallup poll.
Harris told The View earlier this month that there’s “not a thing” she would have done differently than President Joe Biden if she were the sitting president instead. And Biden is such an unpopular incumbent that he dropped out of the 2024 presidential election against an opponent he beat four years prior.
Harris can run on cutting taxes and securing the border and downplay her 2020 Democratic presidential primary bid, where she sounded indistinguishable on policy from socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT). However, tens of millions of voters can see past her act.
They know that she’s a part of an administration that worsened inflation and shrunk people’s paychecks with its $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan Act. They also know that border security has been abysmal under the Biden administration and that politicians who want freebies for illegal immigrants and decriminalized illegal border crossings aren’t serious about protecting our southern border.
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Some people find Trump’s rhetoric and personality off-putting. Yet, America didn’t have runaway inflation when he was president, and he repeatedly took actions to secure the southern border, including building more barriers and creating the “Remain in Mexico” policy, among others.
It’s about time the better candidate was the favorite to win a presidential election in this country. People are finally starting to understand what four years of a Democrat in the White House does — and it’s not good.
Tom Joyce (@TomJoyceSports) is a political reporter for the New Boston Post in Massachusetts.